George Peele was born about 1558, and was educated at the
grammar school of Christ's Hospital, of which his father James
Peele, a maker of pageants, was clerk, and at Oxford, where he
proceeded B.A. in 1577 and M.A. in 1579. When he returned to
Oxford on business in 1583, two years after his departure for
London, he was called upon to manage the performance of two Latin
plays by William Gager for the entertainment of Alasco, a Polish
prince, and in two sets of Latin elegiacs Gager commended Peele
as wit and poet. The rest of his life was apparently spent in
literary work in London among such friends as Greene, Lodge,
Nashe, and Watson. Like other convivial spirits among the literary
men of the time, Peele seems to have been given to excesses.
These probably hastened his end, and were no doubt responsible
for the ascription to him of a series of escapades and sayings,
chiefly fabulous in all likelihood, which furnished material
for the Jests of George Peele, published about 1605. He
was buried in the Parish of St. James, Clerkenwell, November
9, 1596.

Peele's extent work is predominantly dramatic. His first play,
The Arraignment of Paris, was prepared for boys and acted
before Elizabeth. It's poetic fancy, like the wit and conceit
of Lyly's prose dialogue, made its
appeal to courtly taste. Nashe in the preface to Greene's Menaphon
(1589) declares that it reveals the "pregnant dexterity
of wit and manifold variety of invention" of Peele, whom
he calls the great maker of phrases ("primum verborum
artifex"). Peele was soon writing for the companies
of professional players, and had his share, with other University
Wits, in transforming the crude popular drama of the London stage
into literary drama. His great contribution lay in his poetic
diction, but with his fellows he experimented in the various
types of plays in vogue between 1585 and 1595. In addition to
The Arraignment of Paris and The Old Wives' Tale,
Peele wrote the crude chronicle play of King Edward the First,
published in mutilated form in 1593 and 1599; The Battle of
Alcazar, which, although it was published anonymously in
1594, is generally recognized as Peele's from internal evidence
and from the fact that six lines from it were printed as his
in England's Parnassus (1600); and The Love of King
David and Fair Bethsabe, published in 1599, regarding the
merit of whose ornate verse there is a wide range of opinion.
He also wrote several plays now lost and verse for London pageants.

The masque-like pastoral, The Arraignment of Paris,
often considered Peele's best play, was published anonymously,
and apparently without entry in the Stationer's registry, by
Henry Marsh in 1584. Its authorship is established by Nashe's
allusion in the preface of Menaphon and by the attribution
of two of its songs to Peele in England's Parnassus. From
the Greek myth of Paris' award of the golden apple, used by Udall
to flatter Anne Boleyn, Peele fashioned an elaborate compliment
to her daughter Elizabeth. No specific source has been found
for the play, but Peele followed pastoral traditions. He is indebted
to Spenser's Shepherd's Calendar for the names of the
shepherds, and, as Miss Jeffrey has shown, to Paulilli's Il
Giuditio di Paride for many conventional devices.

The Old Wives' Tale was entered in the Stationer's
Register, April 16, 1595, and printed by John Danter the same
year. The identification of the initials "G.P." on
the title page as those of George Peele, which was made by Herbert
in Typographical Antiquities, has never been challenged.
The date of composition is usually thought to lie between 1590
and 1593, but recently Larson has argued for a date between January,
1593, and May, 1594. The play is essentially a medley of motives
and incidents drawn from folk tales. Thus the main incident of
the pursuit of Delia and her rescue from the conjuror gives the
earliest extant version of a tale found also in a section of
Christopher Middleton's Chinon of England (1597) and in
Milton's Comus. All three are modified forms of the folk
tale Childe Rowland, in which the youngest of three brothers
rescues his sister from the elf king after the other two have
failed. In the play the successful brother is replaced by a suitor
and his helper, who come from a tale of "The Lady and the
Monster" type. Peele probably followed some form of it closely,
for the main incidents and most of the details of the Euminides
plot appear in one version or another of a modern folk tale which
is best known as one of the components of Jack the Giant Killer.
A stock motive in the tale of this type is that of "The
Grateful Dead," which Peele used in its most conventional
form--the ghostly helper exacting a promise of half the hero's
gains and as a test of loyalty demanding that the rescued lady
be cut in two. In this form the motive is found, much earlier
than the play, in Oliver of Castile, translated from French
and printed in England in 1518. Still another folk tale introduced
in the play is The Three Heads of the Well, with its contrasted
sisters, which is linked to the main thread by the marriage of
the sisters to two who have failed in the quest for Delia. While
Peele possibly found many of these various incidents already
combined in some folk tale which he followed, evidently he made
modifications in the details. For instance, the contrast between
the husbands of the two sisters in The Three Heads of the
Well has been subordinated in the play to the treatment of
them as stock comic figures, one a clown and the other a braggart.
Though the induction, as in The Taming of the Shrew and
The Knight of the Burning Pestle, satirizes the taste
of the audience, its primary purpose here is to indicate the
source of the material in folk tale. The name Sacrapant and some
of the lines in the play came from Greene's Orlando Furioso,
derived from Ariosto.

This article was originally published
in Elizabethan and Stuart Plays Ed. Charles Read Baskervill.
New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1934. pp. 205-6.